I’m usually very against criticizing other people’s charitable or philanthropic efforts. The first people to be criticized should be those who don’t do anything, not those who try to do good.
But switching from beef to other meats (at least chicken, fish, or eggs, I’m less sure for other meats) is so common among socially- and environmentally-conscious people, and such a clear disaster on animal welfare grounds, that it’s worth discussing.
Even if we assume the the reducitarian diet emits the same GHGs as a plant-based diet, you’ll save about 0.4 tonnes of CO2e per year, the equivalent of a $4 donation (in expectation) to Founders Pledge’s climate fund. Meanwhile, for every beef meal you replace with chicken, 200x more animals have to be slaughtered.
I’d bet that for ~any reasonable estimate of the damages of climate change and the moral value of farmed animal lives, this math does not work out favourably.
I’m usually very against criticizing other people’s charitable or philanthropic efforts. The first people to be criticized should be those who don’t do anything, not those who try to do good.
But switching from beef to other meats (at least chicken, fish, or eggs, I’m less sure for other meats) is so common among socially- and environmentally-conscious people, and such a clear disaster on animal welfare grounds, that it’s worth discussing.
Even if we assume the the reducitarian diet emits the same GHGs as a plant-based diet, you’ll save about 0.4 tonnes of CO2e per year, the equivalent of a $4 donation (in expectation) to Founders Pledge’s climate fund. Meanwhile, for every beef meal you replace with chicken, 200x more animals have to be slaughtered.
I’d bet that for ~any reasonable estimate of the damages of climate change and the moral value of farmed animal lives, this math does not work out favourably.